COUNSEL TO THE PRESIDENT: A Memoir. By Clark Clifford with Richard Holbrooke. (Random House, $25.) A life and a career of extraordinary scope, recalled by the polished lawyer from St. Louis whose 45-year career as public and private adviser to generations of Democrats discreetly made him one of the century's most influential men.

A DAMNED SERIOUS BUSINESS. By Rex Harrison. (Bantam, $21.95.) A last observation on a life in comedy, written shortly before his death. Though sometimes vulgar and arrogant, Rex Harrison always worked at what he did best: presenting a superior facade over calculated insecurity. This book is another demonstration of his art.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS. By William S. McFeely. (Norton, $24.95.) A detailed and finely written portrait of the former slave who became a great orator, civil rights crusader and editor.

FROM LENIN TO LENNON: A Memoir of Russia in the Sixties. By David Gurevich. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $21.95.) A dryly witty account of totalitarian life along the Volga offers an important lesson: the most typical horrors are not savage repressions but the routine humiliations of the average citizen.

FROM THE OLD MARKETPLACE. By Joseph Buloff. (Harvard University, $19.95.) Posthumously published, this charming memoir by a veteran of the Yiddish and Broadway theaters is cast as a tale of coming of age in prerevolutionary Lithuania.

GOD, COUNTRY, NOTRE DAME. By Theodore M. Hesburgh with Jerry Reedy. (Doubleday, $21.95.) The life of the priest best known as the president of the University of Notre Dame reads like oral history -- easily, at times breezily, as if the author were just chatting about himself.

KING EDWARD VIII: A Biography. By Philip Ziegler. (Knopf, $24.95.) The well-known story of how the Fairy Prince became a mortal takes on new freshness and excitement in this frank and generous portrait that draws on hitherto unavailable sources.

I REMEMBER NOTHING MORE: The Warsaw Children's Hospital and the Jewish Resistance. By Adina Blady Szwajger. (Pantheon, $20.) An unsentimental memoir, at once damning and uplifting, by a doctor who did her duty until it could no longer be done.

A LIFE OF HER OWN: A Countrywoman in Twentieth-Century France. By Emilie Carles, as told to Robert Destanque. (Rutgers University, $19.95.) Rural canniness is conveyed in the voice of a peasant in this memoir, immensely popular in France, of a sharp-tongued country teacher who fought to keep the Alps unspoiled.

A LIFE OF PICASSO: Volume One, 1881-1906. By John Richardson, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully. (Random House, $39.95.) The first of a projected four volumes, this remarkable achievement brings to life the painter and the world he lived in.

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN: The Duty of Genius. By Ray Monk. (Free Press, $29.95.) A vivid, credible, substantial biography of the philosopher, one of the world's smartest and oddest men.

MOSCOW AND BEYOND: 1986 to 1989. By Andrei Sakharov. (Knopf, $19.95.) The second volume of memoirs by the heroic Soviet physicist and democratic idealist covers his final years, from the end of exile to his last speech to the Congress of People's Deputies.

THE PATRIARCH: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty. By Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones. (Summit, $24.95.) This prodigy of research and interviewing is both a history of the family that built a distinguished newspaper empire in Louisville, Ky., and a psychodrama of the squabbling siblings who destroyed it.

PATRIMONY: A True Story. By Philip Roth. (Simon & Schuster, $19.95.) Mr. Roth brings his gift for attention and prodigious storytelling powers to his father's struggle with a fatal brain tumor in this agonized, often comic, infallibly realistic account.

RIGHTEOUS PILGRIM: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874-1952. By T. H. Watkins. (Holt, $35.) A huge yet charming biography of the articulate reform politician, F.D.R.'s Secretary of the Interior, who did so much to define liberalism in his time.

THE SEARCH FOR GOD AT HARVARD. By Ari L. Goldman. (Times Books/Random House, $20.) A Times reporter's engaging account of a year at the Harvard Divinity School.

SERIOUS PLEASURES: The Life of Stephen Tennant. By Philip Hoare. (Hamish Hamilton/ Viking, $29.95.) A biography both scholarly and hilarious of a truly amazing creature, a man who aspired only to be decorative and succeeded tremendously.

SQUANDERED FORTUNE: The Life and Times of Huntington Hartford. By Lisa Rebecca Gubernick. (Putnam, $24.95.) The riches-to-rags saga of a remarkably privileged American who never quite found his calling while losing nearly all his money.

SOMEDAY. By Andrew H. Malcolm. (Knopf, $22.) A Times reporter's delicate, engrossing account of his own involvement with issues of death and dying as a journalist and as a son.

TURNING JAPANESE: Memoirs of a Sansei. By David Mura. (Atlantic Monthly, $22.95.) A journey of discovery by a poet and third-generation Japanese-American who explores the sense of difference that haunts him both at home and in Japan.

WANDERING GHOST: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn. By Jonathan Cott. (Knopf, $24.95.) An "informal biographical reader," in the author's phrase, about the eccentric American journalist who ended his days in 1904 as a substantial Japanese citizen and talented interpreter of its culture to the West.

WOODY ALLEN: A Biography. By Eric Lax. (Knopf, $24.) A journalist's fond chronicle of the film maker's life captures his essential, Bob Hope-versus-Ingmar Bergman tension.

VOICES IN THE MIRROR: An Autobiography. By Gordon Parks. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22.95.) The distinguished photographer, painter, writer, composer and film maker renders a handsome and generous portrait of his life and times.

YOU'LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS TOWN AGAIN. By Julia Phillips. (Random House, $22.) This excruciating first-person, deep-in-freebase narrative by a former film producer may be the most damning view of Hollywood since last week's Variety.

YOU'VE HAD YOUR TIME: The Second Part of the Confessions. By Anthony Burgess. (Grove Weidenfeld, $23.50.) A grand self-explanation by the prodigiously prolific novelist, translator, composer, conductor, essayist, critic and omnipresence. Children

AT THE CROSSROADS. Written and illustrated by Rachel Isadora. (Greenwillow, $13.95.) The children in a South African shantytown are waiting for their fathers to return from their work in the mines. They wait and wait, and come the morning, come the fathers, who carry their rejoicing children from the road back to the shacks. (Ages 4 and up)

A BOY WANTS A DINOSAUR. By Hiawyn Oram. Illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $13.95.) Buying a pet for Alex at the Dino-Store is a simple transaction, but dinosaur care and maintenance prove to be a tall order. Fred (for that is her name) pines for the swamp. The setting is a wittily detailed, wildly animated London cityscape. (Ages 5 to 9)

EIGHT HANDS ROUND: A Patchwork Alphabet. By Ann Whitford Paul. Illustrated by Jeanette Winter. (HarperCollins, $14.95.) Only incidentally an alphabet book, this sampler uses 26 quilt patterns to piece together a charming history of quilts and the early American life that inspired them. The illustrations, boldly colored and gently washed out, are just right. (Ages 8 and up)

THE FROG PRINCE, CONTINUED. By Jon Scieszka. Illustrated by Steve Johnson. (Viking, $14.95.) Now a nice yuppie-looking man in a suit and tie, the unhappily married Frog Prince packs his bag and leaves, but the witches he meets are apparently heavily influenced by Stephen Sondheim. The illustrations are witty and spooky at the same time. (Ages 5 and up)

LYDDIE. By Katherine Paterson. (Lodestar, $14.95.) The battleground is the Industrial Revolution in America, specifically the mills of Lowell, Mass., in the mid-1840's; and the heroine, Lydia Worthen, is in many ways larger than life in order to endure what she endures. The novel is full of life, full of lives, full of reality. (Ages 10 and up) Crime

BODY OF EVIDENCE. By Patricia D. Cornwell. (Scribners, $18.95.) In this nerve-jangling book, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Virginia, is stunned by the savagery of a young novelist's death.

THE CAVALIER CASE. By Antonia Fraser. (Bantam, $17.95). This seventh book in the Jemima Shore mystery series involves the ghost of a 17th-century poet, an upscale tennis club and modern London society. Ms. Fraser writes with zest and verve, and her primary interest is people.

THE CITY WHEN IT RAINS. By Thomas H. Cook. (Putnam, $19.95.) A brooding, haunting work about a bizarre suicide and a freelance photographer who covers Manhattan after dark, when its guard is down.

GOOD NIGHT, MR. HOLMES. By Carole Nelson Douglas. (Tom Doherty/Tor, $18.95.) The author, who has a saucy style and a delicious sense of humor, purports to tell how Irene Adler outfoxed Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia."

NIGHT OF THE ICE STORM. By David Stout. (Mysterious Press/Warner, $19.95.) Nature goes on a rampage in this coolly terrifying novel set in upstate New York, unleashing in one person the passion for murder.

PRIOR CONVICTIONS. By Lia Matera. (Simon & Schuster, $17.95.) Willa Jansson, one of the most articulate and surely the wittiest of women sleuths at large in the genre, finds herself compromised in a securities fraud case involving 60's radicals.

RUMPOLE A LA CARTE. By John Mortimer. (Viking, $18.95.) The eighth collection of stories about the barrister; that they continue to be so enjoyable is a mark of both the author's craftsmanship and his natural talent.

WIDOWS. By Ed McBain. (Morrow, $19.) A wealthy lawyer is gunned down on the street in Mr. McBain's latest 87th Precinct novel. The author does his usual brilliant job of making human beings out of hard-bitten policemen. Current Affairs and Social Commentary

THE BEAUTY MYTH: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. By Naomi Wolf. (Morrow, $21.95.) A sweeping, vigorous book about the ways women enslave themselves -- and their bank accounts -- to an industry that promises physical perfection.

BLOOD OF BROTHERS: Life and War in Nicaragua. By Stephen Kinzer. (Putnam, $24.95.) Mr. Kinzer, who reported for The Times from Nicaragua from 1983 to 1989, examines United States policy and Sandinista rule during the period; both get failing marks.

BRINGING DOWN THE GREAT WALL: Writings on Science, Culture, and Democracy in China. By Fang Lizhi. (Knopf, $19.95.) A comprehensive selection of the written (and spoken) words of the witty, passionate, tenacious and articulate Chinese scientist and dissident who at present is living in the United States.

CHUTZPAH, by Alan M. Dershowitz. (Little, Brown, $22.95.) Afraid of rocking the boat, too many American Jews see themselves as guests in someone else's land, an attorney and civil libertarian argues; the solution, he says, is more chutzpah!

THE DEMOCRATIC WISH: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government. By James A. Morone. (Basic Books, $22.95.) Mr. Morone contends that Americans don't really know what they want government to do; consequently, reform efforts merely add more unresponsive layers of government.

THE END OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE: National Purpose and the Global Economy After the Cold War. By Robert Kuttner. (Knopf, $22.95.) An economics correspondent for The New Republic takes issue with what he views as the myth of a pure market economy and suggests an alternate reality, in a richly detailed book that will have to be taken into account by anyone assessing the present state of the world economy.

FEMINISM WITHOUT ILLUSIONS: A Critique of Individualism. By Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. (University of North Carolina, $24.95.) An insightful and important book by a professor of history at Emory University, challenging the culture's embrace of absolute individual right and feminism's unquestioning acceptance of it.

THE HIDDEN WAR: A Russian Journalist's Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan. By Artyom Borovik. (Morgan Entrekin/Atlantic Monthly, $19.95.) One of the first Soviet journalists to give his readers an honest glimpse of the war, Mr. Borovik concerns himself in these reports with the conflict's cost in lives and spirit.

HOPE AND HISTORY: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement. By Vincent Harding. (Orbis, $10.95.) A collection of essays about the larger meanings of the civil rights movement, written in an incantatory prose that does honor to the religious imperative of the movement itself.

INDIA: A Million Mutinies Now. By V. S. Naipaul. (Viking, $24.95.) Mr. Naipaul's third nonfiction book about India is an elegant documentary tour in which no detail is insignificant; it is also, for a remarkable change, moderately hopeful for the nation's future.

IN SEARCH OF HUMAN NATURE: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. By Carl N. Degler. (Oxford University, $24.95.) A masterly guide to the history of the nature/nurture debate and the reverberations of Darwinian ideas in both popular and academic social thinking.

THE LAST FINE TIME. By Verlyn Klinkenborg. (Knopf, $19.95.) Mr. Klinkenborg's talent for evoking time and place shines in this respectful, affectionate account of a family (into which he later married) and a neighborhood in a Buffalo that is no more.

A MAN WITHOUT WORDS. By Susan Schaller. (Summit, $17.95.) The objects of this fine meditative investigation by a sign-language interpreter are a deaf Mexican man and the agonizing limits imposed on him by having no language whatsoever.

THE MONEY MACHINE: How KKR Manufactured Power & Profits. By Sarah Bartlett. (Warner, $24.95.) A readable and insightful examination of the company that perfected the leveraged buyout, by a Times reporter who doesn't hesitate to identify heroes and villains.

THE NEXT CENTURY. By David Halberstam. (Morrow, $16.95.) An engaging book by a talented journalist that approaches the prospects for the United States and other nations not through statistics but by eliciting the temperament of the inhabitants.

THE NEW RUSSIANS. By Hedrick Smith. (Random House, $24.95.) A former Times correspondent, the author of "The Russians," returns for another encounter with Soviet people; the result is sympathetic but balanced between realism and enthusiasm.

THE PRIZE: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. By Daniel Yergin. (Simon & Schuster, $24.95.) A comprehensive, careful book that pulls together reams of information in its analysis of modern society's dependence on a resource it cannot control.

THE PROMISED LAND: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. By Nicholas Lemann. (Knopf, $24.95.) A skillful, energetic account of the migration of 6.5 million black people from rural South to urban North between 1910 and 1970.

REAGAN AND THATCHER. By Geoffrey Smith. (Norton, $22.95.) An anecdotal essay, by a columnist for The Times of London, on the longest and most mutually admiring collaboration between national leaders in British-American history.

STREETWISE: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. By Elijah Anderson. (University of Chicago, $19.95.) A sharply observed stoop-level study of two Philadelphia neighborhoods -- one gentrifying, the other in total collapse.

THERE ARE NO CHILDREN HERE: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America. By Alex Kotlowitz. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $21.95.) A sensitive and unremitting survey of the life and times of Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, their family and the Chicago housing project they live in.

THE TRUE AND ONLY HEAVEN: Progress and Its Critics. By Christopher Lasch. (Norton, $25.) Contentious, provocative and polemical, Mr. Lasch argues that the idea of progress as now understood by liberals rests on untenable beliefs about expanding consumption to which lower-middle-class values are the antidote.

THE TRUTH ABOUT CHERNOBYL. By Grigori Medvedev. (Basic Books, $22.95.) A slender classic in the history of nuclear power and of glasnost, this reconstruction of the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl by the Soviet engineer assigned to investigate its causes is a sorry tale of incompetence before, during and after.

A VERY THIN LINE: The Iran-Contra Affairs. By Theodore Draper. (Hill & Wang, $27.95.) A richly detailed, formidably researched analysis concludes that the Iran-contra cover-up was no aberration, but evidence of what can happen when a President overreaches himself.

THE WAY OF THE WASP. By Richard Brookhiser. (Free Press, $19.95.) Sometimes serious and always clever, Mr. Brookhiser celebrates America's once-upon-a-time dominant ethos and hopes that President Bush will lead a WASP renaissance.

WHY AMERICANS HATE POLITICS. By E. J. Dionne Jr. (Simon & Schuster, $22.95.) No wonder the public is fed up with politics and government: both liberals and conservatives are ideologically bankrupt and still fighting the battles of the 1960's, according to a journalist's cogent, stimulating analysis.

THE CROOKED TIMBER OF HUMANITY: Chapters in the History of Ideas. By Isaiah Berlin. (Knopf, $22.) Wise and learned essays that echo one of the historian's favorite themes -- pluralism versus utopianism. Pluralism is recommended.

GOOD BOYS AND DEAD GIRLS: And Other Essays. By Mary Gordon. (Viking, $19.95.) Like her novels, Ms. Gordon's essays are sustained by a powerful moral vision, and are at their best when life, art and Irish Catholicism are the subjects.

LOVE WITHOUT WINGS: Some Friendships in Literature and Politics. By Louis Auchincloss. (Houghton Mifflin, $18.95.) Brief, always graceful essays exploring friendship as practiced by Henry James, Henry Adams and others we'd like to have known.

MODERNITY ON ENDLESS TRIAL. By Leszek Kolakowski. (University of Chicago, $24.95.) A historian of philosophy argues in these handsome, pessimistic essays that our 20th-century sense of crisis will not go away; we'll just have to muddle through.

NEW WORLD AVENUE AND VICINITY. By Tadeusz Konwicki. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.95.) A sort of writer's diary of the 1980's by the great Polish jester and grump, confronting the nation's apparently hopeless predicament with ironic detachment.

A PASSIONATE APPRENTICE: The Early Journals, 1897-1909. By Virginia Woolf. Edited by Mitchell A. Leaska. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $24.95.) The scrupulously edited contents of seven notebooks that show a teen-ager growing into a writer.

OPERA AND ITS SYMBOLS: The Unity of Words, Music, and Staging. By Robert Donington. (Yale University, $29.95.) A book-length essay by a performer and scholar that argues for a fusion of production elements into an archetypal, myth-endowed whole.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. By David Lehman. (Poseidon, $21.95.) A poet, critic and journalist examines a literary philosophy and the flap that ensued when the Nazi-shaded past of a leading practitioner showed up.

THE USES OF ERROR. By Frank Kermode. (Harvard University, $24.95.) Reviews published between 1967 and 1989 by a scholar and critic who knows how to speak to common readers, and likes to. Fiction

BEYOND THE CURVE. By Kobo Abe. (Kodansha, $18.95.) The dozen stories in Mr. Abe's first story collection in English place his boundlessly confident protagonists in impossible situations.

THE BOOK OF SAINTS. By Nino Ricci. (Knopf, $19.) A beautifully paced first novel, almost mythological in its impact, about a poor Italian mountain village and a family left behind by immigration.

CHICAGO LOOP. By Paul Theroux. (Random House, $20.) A hard, unrelentingly bleak novel that is an exploration of one man's violent sexual nightmare, his crime and his punishment.

CIRCLE OF FRIENDS. By Maeve Binchy. (Delacorte, $19.95.) A nothing-fancy novel that recounts with extraordinary straightforwardness and insight the lives and passions of three Irish women who became friends in college.

COMPLETE COLLECTED STORIES. By V. S. Pritchett. (Random House, $35.) These 82 stories -- all the author, at 90, wants to preserve -- are a monument to a great writer of short fiction and an index to the continuities of human passion since the 1930's.

THE CONTINUING SILENCE OF A POET: The Collected Stories of A. B. Yehoshua. (Penguin, Paper, $9.95.) The realities and contradictions of Israeli life, plumbed by a renowned storyteller.

CRIMES OF CONSCIENCE. By Nadine Gordimer. (Heinemann, Paper, $8.95.) Tricky moral ground is deftly negotiated in 11 tales of contemporary South Africa, its politics and its betrayals.

A CURE FOR DREAMS. By Kaye Gibbons. (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $14.95.) An engagingly personal novel set in the North Carolina community of her two previous novels; this anecdotal tale of three generations of family history reveals a maturity of vision.

A DANGEROUS WOMAN. By Mary McGarry Morris. (Viking, $19.95.) In Ms. Morris's second novel an emotionally disturbed young woman struggles against traps of circumstance and personality that offer no real hope of escape.

DARCY'S UTOPIA. By Fay Weldon. (Viking, $18.95.) An unflinching satirical novel whose heroine's zeal to remodel the world makes her a media sensation and the founder of a new religion.

THE DIAMOND LANE. By Karen Karbo. (Putnam, $21.95.) A wonderfully comic novel about savvy Hollywood outsiders trying to get in -- and to juggle their disastrous but funny love lives.

DOCTOR SLEEP. By Madison Smartt Bell. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $19.95.) Mr. Bell's sixth novel once more captures the poignant in the freakish, this time in the life of an American in London, a recovered heroin addict and practicing hypnotherapist.

DONALD DUK. By Frank Chin. (Coffee House Press, Paper, $9.95.) The 11-year-old hero of Mr. Chin's inventive, energetic first novel is educated in his Chinese heritage through a series of astonishing dreams about working on the Central Pacific Railroad in 1869.

DRINKING DRY CLOUDS: Stories From Wyoming. By Gretel Ehrlich. (Capra, Paper, $9.95.) Eloquent and often comic linked pieces set in the West in the 1940's, in which the humor derives not from wit but from the characters' bewilderment.

FATHER MELANCHOLY'S DAUGHTER. By Gail Godwin. (Morrow, $21.95.) The author's 10th book of fiction -- about a young woman, her minister father, and the woman who abandons them both -- has a number of real satisfactions.

THE FIREMAN'S FAIR. By Josephine Humphreys. (Viking, $19.95.) Set on a barrier island off the South Carolina coast, this warm and comfortable novel about love and community is far better written than most.

GOSPEL HOUR. By T. R. Pearson. (Morrow, $19.95.) In Mr. Pearson's fifth tall novel of the modern South a not-very-smart lumber worker allows unscrupulous evangelists to transform him into a preacher, "the Lord's boy on this earth."

GRINGOS. By Charles Portis. (Simon & Schuster, $18.95.) A high-rolling picaresque novel propelled by the author's love for his characters, for Mexico and for the eccentricity and pathos of both.

AN HONORABLE PROFESSION. By John L'Heureux. (Viking, $19.95.) Mr. L'Heureux's 13th book is an ambitious, risky combination: a thriller, a philosophical, melodramatic novel of sexual possession, a satire of small-town mores in New England.

HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT. By Whitney Otto. (Villard, $18.) This intricate little first novel about a women's quilting circle in central California is at once a history of social change, a tribute to an art form mostly reserved for women, and a demonstration of how individual lives fit together in a community.

HUNTING THE WILD PINEAPPLE. By Thea Astley. (Putnam, $19.95.) No one fares very well in these compassionate but dark-edged stories by the prolific Australian novelist.

THE INDIAN LAWYER. By James Welch. (Norton, $19.95.) This fine fourth novel by Mr. Welch (himself a Native American) is his first to follow the complex relationships of whites and Indians into the world of white-collar professionals.

IN THE BLUE LIGHT OF AFRICAN DREAMS. By Paul Watkins. (Houghton Mifflin, $18.95.) The existentialist hero of Mr. Watkins's third novel is an American pilot, dragooned into the Foreign Legion, who gets out by blackmailing his superior.

KILLER DILLER. By Clyde Edgerton. (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $17.95.) Wesley Benfield, the delinquent orphan of Mr. Edgerton's "Walking Across Egypt" (1987), is now 24 and lives -- not too wisely or too well -- in a North Carolina halfway house that teaches Baptist values to young criminals.

KISS OUT. By Jill Eisenstadt. (Knopf, $19.95.) A novel of extravagant wackiness, eccentricity and exuberance, featuring a Queens rock singer who loves a virgin from New Jersey.

LADY'S MAID. By Margaret Forster. (Doubleday, $19.95.) This lucid and graceful novel is a fictional account of the love story of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, as seen through the eyes of the servant who made it possible.

LANDSCAPE PAINTED WITH TEA. By Milorad Pavic. (Knopf, $21.95.) A playful, haunting crossword puzzle of a novel in which the lives of hero and heroine change shape as they meet and pass.

THE LAST VOYAGE OF SOMEBODY THE SAILOR. By John Barth. (Little, Brown, $22.95.) An ingenious multi-story fiction, in which a Barth-resembling hero voyages back and forth between the Chesapeake Bay and Burton's "Thousand and One Nights."

THE LAUGHING SUTRA. By Mark Salzman. (Random House, $18.95.) A robust, preposterous novel concerning a Chinese Buddhist lad's effort to recover a sacred text from America, with the help of a supernatural hero thousands of years old.

LIVE FREE OR DIE. By Ernest Hebert. (Viking, $19.95.) The fifth in a series of novels about Darby, N.H., draws to a conclusion Mr. Hebert's vigorous saga of several families, both upper crust and underdog, whose sense of community has been wasted by history.

LOVE AND GARBAGE. By Ivan Klima. (Knopf, $20.) A writer turned street sweeper is enmeshed in a love triangle in this satisfying Czechoslovak novel of conflict and contradiction.

THE MACGUFFIN. By Stanley Elkin. (Linden/Simon & Schuster, $19.95.) Mr. Elkin's besotted, betroped high style, pleading for the power of talk, is at its work in this tale of a municipal bureaucrat looking for meaning not of his own making. Fat chance!

MAGIC HOUR. By Susan Isaacs. (HarperCollins, $21.95.) A murder in the Hamptons is the pretext of this sparkling mystery-romance, in which the investigator falls in love with his own chief suspect.

MALINA. By Ingeborg Bachmann. (Holmes & Meier, $24.95.) An intense, courageous novel that projects an unconventional triangle on a nasty background of corrupted language and power.

MENDELSSOHN IS ON THE ROOF. By Jiri Weill. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.95.) A brilliant novel that renders wartime Prague as seen by its triumphant but ultimately futile German masters.

THE MIRACLE GAME. By Josef Skvorecky. (Knopf, $22.95.) Raffish, acrimonious Danny Smiricky sleeps through the "miracle" of the title in this incident-crammed, gritty and lyrical novel of Czechoslovakia and its travails from 1949 to 1970.

A MODEL WORLD: And Other Stories. By Michael Chabon. (Morrow, $18.95.) Short fiction of kaleidoscopic beauty that explores estrangement and other modern phenomena.

NEW JAPANESE VOICES: The Best Contemporary Fiction From Japan. Edited by Helen Mitsios. (Morgan Entrekin/Atlantic Monthly, $18.95.) Twelve writers whose stylish insouciance challenges some current notions of a Japanese national character.

OBJECT LESSONS. By Anna Quindlen. (Random House, $19.) This engaging, entertaining first novel concerns a huge Irish Catholic family; its focus is the coming of age of Maggie Scanlan, age 13.

ON THE EVE OF UNCERTAIN TOMORROWS. By Neil Bissoondath. (Clarkson N. Potter, $18.95.) In these stories of exile by a Trinidadian now living in Canada, the West stands in for a dream denied, and for most of his emigres there is no going back.

PALACE OF DESIRE: The Cairo Trilogy II. By Naguib Mahfouz. (Doubleday, $22.95.) The second novel in the celebrated trilogy of the 1988 Nobel Prize winner opens in the early 1920's and relates the almost Tolstoyan ups and downs of a Cairo family.

PINOCCHIO IN VENICE. By Robert Coover. (Linden/Simon & Schuster, $19.95.) A Professor Pinenut, retired from an American university, is the hero of Mr. Coover's Rabelaisian burlesque version of Collodi's puppet fable.

SAILOR'S HOLIDAY: The Wild Life of Sailor and Lula. By Barry Gifford. (Random House, $20.) Four long, interrelated, surreal, fantastic stories confect a dark and comic ride through America.

SCUM. By Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $19.95.) Another trip back to the master Yiddish novelist's Warsaw just after the turn of the century, this time in the company of Max Barabander, a rich, self-pitying liar and former thief.

SEA OF LENTILS. By Antonio Benitez-Rojo. (University of Massachusetts, $22.95.) Four narratives, loosely founded on Spanish chronicles of the conquest of the Americas, collide and impinge in this convincing, unsettling novel by a Cuban.

A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR. By Mark Helprin. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $24.95.) Mr. Helprin's vast, ambitious, all-encompassing novel unfolds chiefly in a conversation in 1964 between a learned and reflective Italian veteran of World War I and an illiterate artisan upon whom great lumps of undiluted thought and uncomfortable truth are imposed.

SWALLOW HARD. By Sarah Gaddis. (Atheneum, $19.95.) An elegiac first novel that revolves about the unmastered feelings between a talented young woman and her surly genius of a father.

SWEET EYES. By Jonis Agee. (Crown, $18.95.) A year of sin, passion, cracked Formica and Willie Nelson tunes in fictional Divinity, Iowa, where crazed people yearn to tell their life stories.

THE RISE OF LIFE ON EARTH. By Joyce Carol Oates. (New Directions, $16.95.) A concentrated, single-minded, compact novel that explores the life and consciousness of an abused little girl who grows up to become a hospital worker bent on secret deadly acts.

TO KNOW A WOMAN. By Amos Oz. (Helen and Kurt Wolff/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $19.95.) A claustrophobic, mercilessly domestic novel, in which an Israeli widower, a retired spy, contrives strategies for getting through the day.

TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE. By Bohumil Hrabal. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $16.95.) Published in Czechoslovakia 14 years ago, this irresistibly eccentric romp concerns the life of a gigantically passionate man whose job is the bundling of books to be pulped.

TWO GIRLS, FAT AND THIN. By Mary Gaitskill. (Poseidon, $18.95.) Ms. Gaitskill's grim first novel concerns an obese young woman paralyzed by childhood wounds and an elegant journalist who expresses herself in sadistic sexual relationships.

TYPICAL AMERICAN. By Gish Jen. (Seymour Lawrence/Houghton Mifflin, $19.95.) Gish Jen's first novel explores the transformation of Chinese immigrants into Americans, chiefly through the agency of greed, in prose of epigrammatic swiftness.

WAR FEVER. By J. G. Ballard. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.95.) Fantastic, obsessive stories (and other kinds of fiction) that pursue the reversal of expectation and the extrapolation of trends.

WARTIME LIES. By Louis Begley. (Knopf, $19.) This masterly first novel recounts the wounded moral development of its narrator, a Jew who shared with thousands the misfortune of being born in a time and place to grow up during the Nazi occupation of Poland.

THE WAY THAT WATER ENTERS STONE. By John Dufresne. (Norton, $18.95.) This fine first collection of short stories deals with love lost but never forgotten and with what one character calls "the problem of being a mortal with immortal aspirations."

WHAT WAS MINE: Stories. By Ann Beattie. (Random House, $20.) Portraits of forlorn men and unpredictable women from an author whose famous detachment has given way to greater tenderness.

THE WHITE CASTLE. By Orhan Pamuk. (Braziller, $17.50.) A canny novel of slavery and intrigue in 17th-century Istanbul, from a young Turkish writer with the narrative zip of Scheherazade.

WHITE PEOPLE. By Allan Gurganus. (Knopf, $21.95.) Eleven stories, sharp of eye and ear, all accessible, all evidently the product of a storyteller who knows and loves his work.

WHO DO YOU LOVE. By Valerie Sayers. (Doubleday, $18.95.) Ms. Sayers brings humor, irony, history both national and family, and a fascinating setting all to bear on 37-year-old Dolores Rooney in this affecting novel of 24 hours in Due East, S.C.

WOMAN HOLLERING CREEK: And Other Stories. By Sandra Cisneros. (Random House, $18.) Unforgettable characters march through a satisfying collection of tales about Mexican-Americans who know the score and cling to the anchor of their culture.

THE WOMEN OF WHITECHAPEL AND JACK THE RIPPER. By Paul West. (Random House, $22.) In a gloriously farfetched novel, true crime's most enduring unsolved mystery begins with an idyllic romance between a shopgirl and a prince. History

ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION. By James M. McPherson. (Oxford University, $17.95.) The author of "Battle Cry of Freedom" takes issue with the propositions that the Civil War achieved nothing much and that Lincoln didn't really know what he was up to.

DEAD CERTAINTIES: (Unwarranted Speculations). By Simon Schama. (Knopf, $21.) The death of a British general and the murder of a Massachusetts doctor are the actual incidents around which a historian dextrously weaves multiple accounts, both real and invented, that blend the historical and the poetic.

THE DUEL. 10 May-31 July 1940: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler. By John Lukacs. (Ticknor & Fields, $19.95.) A convincing argument that the particular personalities and decisions of these antagonists determined the future of the world.

FACING THE PHOENIX. By Zalin Grant. (Norton, $22.50.) The history of a South Vietnamese bureaucrat's shrewd pacification program and America's runaway appropriation of its principles.

FREE AT LAST? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It. By Fred Powledge. (Little, Brown, $29.95.) An ample history, frankly partisan but generously comprehensive, of the nonviolent activists of the 1960's and their opponents.

A HISTORY OF THE ARAB PEOPLES. By Albert Hourani. (Belknap/Harvard University, $24.95.) A lifetime of work by one the Arab world's most distinguished scholars lies behind this good, old-fashioned narrative account of 14 centuries.

HITLER'S JUSTICE: The Courts of the Third Reich. By Ingo Muller. (Harvard University, $29.95.) A shocking history, by a former German law professor, of the corruption of justice by the legal establishment during the Nazi period -- and even later.

HOLOCAUST TESTIMONIES: The Ruins of Memory. By Lawrence L. Langer. (Yale University, $25.) This unsparingly honest effort to interpret interviews given by Holocaust survivors reveals conflicts between levels of memory, between the urge to tell and the conviction that no one will understand.

THE HUMAN MOTOR: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. By Anson Rabinbach. (Basic Books, $34.95.) A historian's illuminating examination of the rise and fall of an idea that had far-reaching social consequences: the 19th- and 20th-century concept of the human body as a machine for working.

ONE OF US: Richard Nixon and the American Dream. By Tom Wicker. (Random House, $24.95.) This scrupulous and unconventional account by a Times columnist agrees with the emerging consensus about Mr. Nixon's great abilities, but locates his accomplishments more in domestic than foreign affairs.

THIS PEOPLE'S NAVY: The Making of American Sea Power. By Kenneth J. Hagan. (Free Press, $27.95.) A critical institutional history, in vivid, precise prose, of the United States Navy to 1990.

SLEEPWALKING THROUGH HISTORY: America in the Reagan Years. By Haynes Johnson. (Norton, $24.95.) A columnist for The Washington Post examines the 1980's with comprehensiveness, bite and skill. Poetry

THE CITY IN WHICH I LOVE YOU. By Li-Young Lee. (BOA Editions, Cloth, $18; Paper, $9.) Explosive and earthy poems by an audacious and passionate poet-traveler who takes great chances in verse that is colloquial and metaphysical at the same time.

THE CONTINUOUS LIFE. By Mark Strand. (Knopf, $18.95.) Poetry written as if in the shadow of high mountains and touched with their grandeur, along with satiric and comic verse, a new departure for this poet.

CRIME AGAINST NATURE. By Minnie Bruce Pratt. (Firebrand Books, Cloth, $18.95; Paper, $8.95.) These poems have an emphatic perspective -- that of a feminist, lesbian mother -- derived from personal experience. They have a familiar, elegant tonal beauty, but each one is a verbal emergency, original and startling.

OLD AND NEW POEMS. By Donald Hall. (Ticknor & Fields, Cloth, $24.95; Paper, $12.95.) Donald Hall is our time's great elegist. In this collection of verse from the last 15 years he celebrates the passing of people and things with grieving joy in burly lines that are classical in dignity and perfectly readable.

THE WORLD OF THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS. Poems 1980-1990. By Charles Wright. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) These poems can be read as a single poetic sequence like John Berryman's "Dream Songs." They chart a spiritual quest, an investigation of relations between the visible world and the invisible. Popular Culture

BEHIND THE MASK OF INNOCENCE. By Kevin Brownlow. (Knopf, $50.) Mr. Brownlow, a movie historian of amazing resourcefulness, investigates the film of social criticism (often laced with sex and violence) in America from 1903 to 1928.

CAGE CUNNINGHAM JOHNS: Dancers on a Plane. (Knopf/Anthony d'Offay Gallery, $50.) A handsomely produced book of pictures and essays (by six critics), expanding on a celebration in 1989 of the work and friendships of the composer John Cage, the dancer Merce Cunningham and the painter Jasper Johns.

INSIDE CHRISTIE'S. By John Herbert. (St. Martin's, $24.95.) An interesting and troublemaking book about the renowned auction house, written by its former publicity director.

ON BROADWAY: A Journey Uptown Over Time. By David W. Dunlap. (Rizzoli, $65.) An arresting, authoritative look at the past and present of Manhattan's 17-mile main street, by a reporter for The New York Times who takes fine photographs as well. Religion and Mythology

THE BLACK CHURCH IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. By C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya. (Duke University, Cloth, $47.50; Paper, $18.95.) A study both broad and deep of the "invisible institution" that has been a vehicle of social and spiritual transformation for two centuries.

EUNUCHS FOR THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church. By Uta Ranke-Heinemann. (Doubleday, $21.95.) A historical critique of the Roman Catholic Church's attitude toward women and sexuality by a German Catholic and professor of the history of religion; few theologians have targeted church sexual teaching from so many angles or as trenchantly.

IRON JOHN: A Book About Men. By Robert Bly. (Addison-Wesley, $18.95.) A poet's timely examination of the male psyche and the need men seem to have for a spiritual infusion from myths and mentors to help them manage the change from child to adult.

MARTIN & MALCOLM & AMERICA: A Dream or a Nightmare. By James H. Cone. (Orbis, $22.95.) A theologian argues that the visions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were converging in their final years into a joint legacy all Americans can profit by.

THE MYTHOLOGY OF MEXICO AND CENTRAL AMERICA. By John Bierhorst. (Morrow, $14.95.) In his third volume of native American mythology, Mr. Bierhorst tracks shared beliefs and common experiences from a wide range of sources.

THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF CHILDREN. By Robert Coles. (Peter Davison/Houghton Mifflin, $22.95.) Showing again how much can be learned by paying attention, Dr. Coles explores the role of religious thought in creating wholeness in children's lives. Science, Medicine and Psychology

BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS: Reflections in Natural History. By Stephen Jay Gould. (Norton, $22.95.) A provocative, spirited collection -- his best so far -- by the Stan Musial of essay writing.

THE CHANGING ATMOSPHERE: A Global Challenge. By John Firor. (Yale University, $19.95.) Mr. Firor, an atmospheric scientist, argues that man-made environmental change is inevitable and that further inaction will complicate our survival.

FEMALE PERVERSIONS: The Temptations of Emma Bovary. By Louise J. Kaplan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $24.95.) A fascinating, ambitious study by a psychoanalyst who argues that such conduct as shoplifting and compulsive sexy dressing are the female equivalents of more familiar male paraphilias.

IN THE PALACES OF MEMORY: How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads. By George Johnson. (Knopf, $22.95.) A lucid examination by a science journalist and Times editor of work in progress toward the understanding of human intelligence.

THE JOY OF INSIGHT: Passions of a Physicist. By Victor Weisskopf. (Basic Books, $24.95.) The memoirs of a gifted thinker remarkable for the breadth of his culture and of his sympathies.

LEARNED OPTIMISM. By Martin E. P. Seligman. (Knopf, $19.95.) A provocative and useful book about pessimism and optimism as learned behaviors, with a detailed program for literally changing one's mind.

LONELY HEARTS OF THE COSMOS: The Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe. By Dennis Overbye. (HarperCollins, $25.) A vivid journalistic history of the amazing discoveries -- as well as the amazing speculations -- of the last 20 years of cosmology.

MODELS OF MY LIFE. By Herbert A. Simon. (Basic Books, $26.95.) The Nobel laureate's autobiography shows his scientific activity -- most notably, his work in artificial intelligence -- as a deeply personal enterprise, a product not of irresistible technology but of the esthetic and self-examination of the researcher himself.

TELL ME A STORY: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory. By Roger C. Schank. (Scribners, $19.95.) An impressive book, and fun to read, about human intelligence and its dependence on the stories we know and retell.

VIRUS HUNTING: AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific Discovery. By Robert Gallo. (New Republic/Basic Books, $22.95.) A scientist's formidable defense of his own version of the events leading up to the discovery of the AIDS virus.

WITNESSES FROM THE GRAVE: The Stories Bones Tell. By Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover. (Little, Brown, $19.95.) A satisfyingly grisly guide, by two science writers, to the techniques and achievements of forensic anthropology. Science Fiction

BRAIN CHILD. By George Turner. (Morrow, $20.) An updated "Frankenstein" by an Australian, this novel brilliantly unpacks the secrets of the Nursery Project, in which scientific tinkering with the human genome has created three groups of unlovable supermen and superwomen.

THE RAGGED WORLD. By Judith Moffett (St. Martin's, $18.95.) This adult novel deals with little furry aliens and time travel, but its main focus is on ordinary and not-so-ordinary people caught up in events that, for all their cosmic significance, are played out on what can only be called a domestic scale.

DAYS OF ATONEMENT. By Walter Jon Williams (Tom Doherty/Tor, $19.95). This genre-straddling blend of science fiction and police procedural features Loren Hawn, a southwestern Columbo who is a lot smarter than he looks, able both to poke into the mysteries of high-energy physics at the tight-lipped research lab outside of town and to take the law into his own hands.

CARVE THE SKY. By Alexander Jablokov. (Morrow, $21.95.) Set in a vibrant 24th century not unlike 14th-century Burgundy, this story brings to life a society where the attainment of power and the appreciation of beauty are not seen as mutually exclusive aims.

THE SILICON MAN. By Charles Platt. (Spectra/ Bantam, Paper, $4.50.) The author imagines what it would be like to be reconstituted as an "infomorph," a computer program so carefully modeled on the human brain that it can "experience" any sensory input it chooses. Mr. Platt's musings lead to some unsettling conclusions. Spies & Thrillers

CRIMES OF THE CITY. By Robert Rosenberg. (Simon & Schuster, $18.95.) A superior, well-written thriller that introduces Avram Cohen, a police detective in Jerusalem, and concerns the slaying of two nuns in a Russian Orthodox convent.

THE EAGLE HAS FLOWN. By Jack Higgins. (Simon & Schuster, $21.95.) In the sequel to "The Eagle Has Landed," Heinrich Himmler orders a general to attempt a daring rescue in London. Mr. Higgins is an expert storyteller, and he writes with gusto.

THE HAWTHORNE GROUP. By Thomas Hauser. (Tom Doherty/Tor, $18.95.) A down-to-the-wire book about a woman caught between a multinational corporation and the United States Government. The author raises the reader's heartbeat from the very beginning.

THE MAMUR ZAPT AND THE RETURN OF THE CARPET. By Michael Pearce. (Crime Club/Doubleday, $14.95.) This charming first novel, set in early 20th-century Egypt, begins with an assassination attempt that misfires. The fun of the book is in its description of a distant time and place.

MOSCOW RACETRACK. By Anatoly Gladilin. (Ardis, $21.50.) Written before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, this cynical, fascinating novel features a Moscow teacher who is sent to Paris by the Politburo -- to win money for the Soviet Union at the track.

THE SECRET PILGRIM. By John le Carre. (Knopf, $21.95.) An intriguing amalgam of meditation, fictive autobiography and numerous spy stories whose protagonist, a man named Ned, will be familiar to Mr. le Carre's fans.

WET WORK. By Christopher Buckley. (Knopf, $19.95.) Bodies pile up in this satirical thriller as its wealthy protagonist goes after the system that provided a fatal drug overdose to his granddaughter. Sports

I HAD A HAMMER: The Hank Aaron Story. By Henry Aaron with Lonnie Wheeler. (HarperCollins, $21.95.) A beautifully written rendition of the incredible journey of Henry Aaron as well as of the struggle of African-Americans to play major league baseball.

TED WILLIAMS: A Baseball Life. By Michael Seidel. (Contemporary Books, $19.95.) and TED WILLIAMS: A Portrait in Words and Pictures. Text by Glenn Stout. Edited by Dick Johnson. (Walker & Company, $24.95.) Two books about the Boston Red Sox outfielder whose real power was at the plate -- one, by the author of "Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of '41," provides a rounded biography of Williams; the other, written by a freelance sportswriter in collaboration with the curator of the Sports Museum in Boston, presents a lively and reverential mixture of narrative, photographs and short essays by assorted Williams fans. Travel, Nature and Adventure

BAGHDAD WITHOUT A MAP: And Other Misadventures in Arabia. By Tony Horwitz. (Dutton, $19.95.) A journalist's amusing, often insightful, record of being at loose ends for two years among people whom we do not understand very well, and vice versa.

BURNING BUSH: A Fire History of Australia. By Stephen J. Pyne. (Holt, $27.95.) This exhaustive history of the interaction of nature, fire and mankind on a strange and distant (from us) continent is a major contribution to the literature of environmental studies.

CHASING THE MONSOON. By Alexander Frater. (Knopf, $21.) A delightful, unusual travel book, full of amusing perceptions about India and its inescapable links with the past, recent and remote.

HUNTING MISTER HEARTBREAK: A Discovery of America. By Jonathan Raban. (Edward Burlingame/HarperCollins, $25.) An Englishman with a gift for observation follows an 18th-century spectral guide in a search for this country's great good place.

THE TOTAL PENGUIN. By James Gorman. (Prentice Hall, $29.95.) Hard science and sharp wit: the history, lore, social habits and biology of the world's best-dressed bird, with many superb pictures, mostly by the wildlife photographer Frans Lanting.

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A version of this review; list appears in print on June 9, 1991, on Page 7007018 of the National edition with the headline: SUMMER READING 1991; Books for Vacation Reading. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe